Carpathia Hosting, which owns over 600 servers leased by Megaupload before the government shut down the file-sharing site, has a problem: those servers are worth serious money, but no one is paying the bills.

Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can't pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won't be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them "contraband" and limit Carpathia's options for dealing with them.

Carpathia originally housed the servers in a Virginia warehouse on which the government executed a search warrant back on January 19. After making forensic copies of selected servers, the government withdrew. Megaupload couldn't pay the bills, so Carpathia says it spent $9,000 a day in rent to house the servers it couldn't reuse. This quickly got expensive, so Carpathia trucked all the servers (at a cost, it says, of $65,000) and stuck them in some empty space it had in one of its own facilities. Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

The US government insists that the court has no real jurisdiction over the server issue. In a filing made late yesterday, the government argued that the EFF had highlighted an "unfortunate" situation, but one not before the court (even Megaupload's terms of service warned users not to count on the site as a sole repository for files). As for the MPAA, it hasn't even filed a civil lawsuit yet, and courts should not rule on "speculative matters affecting civil lawsuits that have not yet been filed (and may not be filed at all)." As for Carpathia's request for cash, the government suggests it doesn't deserve any. After all, it's free to wipe and re-lease the servers; the government already has its forensic evidence. The entire dispute is merely a "private contractual matter."

Well, sort of. When it comes to selling or renting the servers back to Megaupload—there the government draws the line. It doesn't want the servers to leave the court's jurisdiction and it worries that they could be used for criminal activity. In addition, "the government recently learned from multiple sources that the Carpathia Servers may contain child pornography, rendering the Carpathia servers contraband."

So Carpathia sits on its servers and waits for the judge's order it has requested. Simply wiping the servers could expose Carpathia to angry rightsholders who want the evidence for cases they intend to file, and to angry Megaupload users whose data would be gone for good. But keeping the hundreds of machines idle costs money, and transferring them to Megaupload—the only interested buyer—may not be possible.

I think I actually feel bad for the host - especially now - they may never get those systems back...

Most certainly. I think it's ridiculous what's happening to them. Not to mention the (most likely) smear campaign could harm their reputation and further decrease their income from alternative sources.

Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

How is this any different than the MAFIAA claiming lost sales on piracy downloads? Just because MU isn't using the servers doesn't mean that they would immediately fill all that capacity especially if they belonged to one of the largest file hosting sites on the planet.

Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

How is this any different than the MAFIAA claiming lost sales on piracy downloads? Just because MU isn't using the servers doesn't mean that they would immediately fill all that capacity especially if they belonged to one of the largest file hosting sites on the planet.

Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

How is this any different than the MAFIAA claiming lost sales on piracy downloads? Just because MU isn't using the servers doesn't mean that they would immediately fill all that capacity especially if they belonged to one of the largest file hosting sites on the planet.

Easy way to tell. Contact them and ask them if they have had to add additional capacity to compensate for the loss due to the MU situation.Also bear in mind that these things are getting devalued while they sit idle anyway, as there is depreciation, which on hardware is quite significant.Plus there are actual costs incurred to transfer the servers, since they were hosted in rented space, and it was costing the company money to keep them there.

So maybe they haven't lost out on money they could be making, but the DEFINITELY have incurred costs which are almost certainly in excess of $100k, and if it was really costing $9k/day, then that's over $500k costs incurred due to the servers sitting and taking up space.

So whether they are losing out on money or not doesn't matter, they already have lost out due to costs.

So, the servers have no backups?!?!?! Forget the hardware, make an image, give the tapes to the lawyers, give them the server specs so they can be restored on servers someone ELSE pays for, and repurpose the damned things!!!!

You can't destroy the data, no, but noone said the data had to be on THOSE boxes...

This is getting ridiculous, simply remove the harddrives, store them somewhere safe until someone makes a valid claim on them, and re-use the servers if you can. This is about Carpathia wanting to make money off the government, mega upload or somebody else. I do feel bad for the host getting stuck in the middle, but that's the chance they took when dealing with megaupload as a customer.

Yeah, this is the trump card. Oh, it MIGHT have kiddie porn on it. So it becomes instantly untouchable by anyone without risking prosecution, whether it's true or not. Now that the Supreme Court says it's okay for false testimony before a Grand Jury - if it's from a cop or a prosecutor - the sky's the limit for governmental abuse.

The Supreme Court has sold us down the river, and will continue to do so as long as ideologues who don't care about the damage to future generations they are doing. Ends justify the means.

Why can't the government just pull the hard drives and let them release the servers?

They might be configured in a non-trivial way that required specific hardware to access. I was employed at a dot-com meltdown with racks of Netapps coupled with Sun servers running a database that was required to access the files. Remove any one piece and the files become meaningless.

(I'm not saying that MegaUpload is set up with these sorts of dependencies, but it's not out of the question, either.)

Why can't the government just pull the hard drives and let them release the servers?

25 Petabytes of Data is 12500 HD's.

That is $1,875,000 in HDD who going to reimburse the Hosting Site?

The host is claiming they are loosing $9000, assuming 10 drives per server that's 1250 servers and $11,250,000, assuming 20 drives per server => $5,625,000. It is far cheaper for them to loose the drives and buy new ones than to keep them and have the entire farm idle.

One thing that is sure to fall out of this: future customer agreements will span a hundred pages of small-print legal jargon when anyone wants to host anything at a colocation facility. Lawyers will brainstorm for every possibly contingency and then take a bunch of hallucinogenics to come up with even more.

I have a feeling this case is going to end up like that one the RIAA has against Jamie whatshername: long, drawn out and cost lots of money for everyone involved while not even proving the point you're trying to make.

OMG! you might have been smoking that marijuana while watching child porn/you may have gotten turned on to child porn before you hired that hooker/you might have been loitering in order to purchase child porn/you were jaywalking to attend a child porn conference in that house we want to confiscate for "legitimate government interests"... etc.

Is anyone here expecting a very hard working technician fella at Carpathia accidentally "updating" these servers and also wipe and overwrite everything on them any time soon (like you now multiple times)? Or maybe a "hacker" that somehow got the passwords and everything and just wipe them by mistake?.... ;-)

I were wondering where the "Think of the children" had gone this week....(I think pedophilia is at least a version of it)

Oh and on the "digital bits war"Sure "copyright infringement" is bad for the hard working artists/creators but to claim it's all negative is plain dumb since sure the "artist/creator" isn't getting any money but it gets some fame instead and that can not be bad...And a lot of creators rarely see more than a fraction of the income...:-)

I'm pretty sure that a file host of that size has the drives configured in a way that they can't access the data directly. I'd be pretty iffy about uploading stuff to some place that anyone working there can look at it. Also I thought I read in an earlier MU article that they aren't able to read data off the drives directly, so they can't easily get legitimate files back to users.

As for the Gov, I'm pretty sure every file hosting service on the planet has some amount of child pornography on it, and the reasons they aren't getting taken down is because the hosts don't access the files directly. Though now with more copyright claims making the news hosting sites (rapidshare, hotfile, fileserve) are implementing scanning software to look for copyrighted material but there will always be ways around it. It's all just messy and the Government is treating MU like a chicken with it's head cut off, just gawking and laughing while it runs around aimlessly in circles. E-animal cruelty, if one were to consider websites creatures.

Also, most artist (musicians at least) make money from touring, as they only see a very small portion of money from record sales. Corporate fats cats are fat.

And for those thinking backups, these are the places stuff gets backed up to, so I seriously doubt they are on contract with a competing company just to backup data that they already probably have in RAID arrays.

Is anyone here expecting a very hard working technician fella at Carpathia accidentally "updating" these servers and also wipe and overwrite everything on them any time soon (like you now multiple times)?

You may be able to make some money by implying the same thing to Carpathia and getting them to hire you. Of course, you'd want to make pretty steep salary demands to deal with the lawyers you'll need to handle the government's investigation of your destruction of evidence. Even if they never actually convict you, it's probably a few years of legal hassle and extra scrutiny from every arm of law enforcement.

I was waiting for the traditional Government lie of "Think of the Children".And I would not put it past these assholes to even go so far as to plant something just to get their way.MAFIAA is Censored from my Wallet for life.FRAK YOU HOLLYWOOD & WASHINGTON

As several people have pointed out this isn't simple a hd or two you can pull out of a computer. This is some sort of raid or distributed file system or combination of both that exist as a whole unit and it is likely not simple to try to reassemble if the drives are removed. Hardware raid could easily be specific to the type of controller or even controller and firmware version. This really isn't the type of thing you just take apart and put back together.

At this point I haven't decided how I feel about the hosting companies situation in this case. Obviously, if the government is correct about MegaUpload, the hosting company was indirectly profiting from the piracy that MU was encouraging but they presumably didn't have any direct knowledge of that piracy or the government would have been going after them too. In retrospect it's easy to say that they should have anticipated this possibility and built something into their contract with MU to cover this possibility but everything is obvious when looking back.

You don't even need that many hard drivers you could store them on LTO 5 Tapes they hold about 1.5-3 TB's about $50 bucks each, probably run you around $420k which is probably better then losing 9k a day plus other loses

Is anyone here expecting a very hard working technician fella at Carpathia accidentally "updating" these servers and also wipe and overwrite everything on them any time soon (like you now multiple times)?

You may be able to make some money by implying the same thing to Carpathia and getting them to hire you. Of course, you'd want to make pretty steep salary demands to deal with the lawyers you'll need to handle the government's investigation of your destruction of evidence. Even if they never actually convict you, it's probably a few years of legal hassle and extra scrutiny from every arm of law enforcement.

Good idea, especially since they would need me to get extradited to the US first witch might take a while.... Now I'm going to head of and make some suggestions so Carphatia can make sure it could "never" happen. And whilst doing those changes something might go wrong, you know since I'm not that great at managing servers...